Quotes of the Day

Consider the boy, at 13 or 18, through the two-way mirror at a police station — oh, he knows you're watching — and see a creature of preternatural poise. He already has the disquieting gift of lowering the temperature of any room he enters. He is armed, by birth and training, with courtly courtesy; it would be called charm, if he were human. These impeccable manners do their best to conceal two of the lad's salient traits: his contempt for people and his almost artistic curiosity in how he might hurt them.

A Paris police inspector, Pascal Popil, has been interested in this boy for five years, and is convinced he has recently murdered a half-dozen men. Yet Popil does not charge him with any of these killings. No, the inspector intuits in the boy a trait stronger and stranger than homicidal brutality: a remoteness from fellow feeling."I don't want a conviction," Popil says, "I want him declared insane. In an asylum they can study him and try to find out what he is.... There's not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we'll call him a monster."

Everyone knows the monster this boy evolved into: Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist who murdered people and ate them. In 2003, the American Film Institute chose his screen incarnation, by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, as the No. 1 villain in Hollywood history. (Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in Silence, was named the top female movie hero. But that was due to either affirmative action or gilt by association.) The AFI also chose Hannibal's description of how his disposed of one of his victims — "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti" — as the 21st most famous movie quote of all time.

Hannibal the Cannibal made his debut in Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon and reappeared in the 1988 Silence and the 1999 Hannibal. All three novels were filmed, Red Dragon twice (once under the title Manhunter). Now there's a fourth novel, a prequel to the others — Lecter's life to the age 18. Hannibal Rising has just been published, with all the hoopla and suspense-mongering of a Harry Potter novel: a first printing of 1.5 million, and no advance copies to reviewers. On Feb. 9 there will be a movie version, for which Harris did the screenplay. That could be unique: a best-selling novelist writing a new book and the movie version to come out almost simultaneously.

The story in brief: Young Hannibal, the son of a Lithuanian count and an Italian noblewoman, lives idyllically with them and his beloved baby sister Mischa — the first of the women Hannibal will love, venerate and dominate. The Nazi blitzkrieg flushes the Lecters out of the family estate and into the woods, where they survive by foraging. In the devastating winter of 1944-45, with the country starving, some army deserters with Nazi tendencies kill Hannibal's parents and round up the local children. "We have to eat or die," one deserter tells them — the kids are to be killed, cooked and eaten. That fate befalls Mischa (who, at two, is oddly thought to have more meat on her than her eight-year-old brother). Hannibal must watch as the brutes boil and devour her; he faints away, and when he comes to he does not speak for five years.

Flash forward to Hannibal at 13 in France. He lives in the chateau of his uncle Robert and Robert's Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki. They are sweet to the boy, who is intoxicated by Lady M's silks and fragrances, and her tutorial interest in him, and her impressive sword collection. (He always loved cutlery.) After she is grossly insulted by the boorish local butcher, chivalrous Hannibal takes one of those swords and does the butcher's work on him: slashes and slices the pig up, then eviscerates and beheads him, leaving the carcass in the sun and taking the head home as a trophy for his patroness. This is just target practice for his grand mission: to track down and kill, splendidly, the men who defiled his sister and made him into this sacred monster.

HANNIBAL DEFECTORS

Critics had their own knives out when Hannibal Rising was published last week. They panned it with vigor and a near-unanimous weakness for cannibal puns. ("An indigestible back story!" "Toothless prequel!" "Hard to swallow!") Of the reviewers I've read, only Malcolm Jones over at Newsweek found some favor with the book, saying he preferred it to Silence, of which he "was never a huge fan," and ranking it second in the tetralogy to Red Dragon.

I'd rate it fourth out of four. But then I think the first three books are, in order, great (Red Dragon), merely terrific (Silence) and epically creepy (Hannibal). The writing in the new one tends to flab compared to the leanness of the earlier books. And there's a bigger problem I'll get to in a minute. For now, call Hannibal Rising an OK book from a superior writer. You'll want to get it, not just to read, and decide for yourself, but to place next to the other Lecters. It has family resemblances: a keen intelligence, a crime-heat reporter's attention to morbid detail and a fearless interest in abnormal psychology. But if the four books in the series were the Marx Brothers, this one would be Zeppo — a supporting actor outplayed by the charismatic stars.

Originally, Hannibal was a supporting character, too. The first two books have more or less the same plot. In Red Dragon, FBI profiler Will Graham, the man who caught and imprisoned Lecter, accepts his intercession and interference as a possible aid in finding a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy (because he leaves bite marks on his corpses). In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling is tracking Buffalo Bill, and again Lecter played the brilliant, deranged, unreliable consigliere.

But Hannibal was one of those supporting players, like Falstaff in Henry IV, whose extravagant personality propels them into the limelight. The trick to the Lecter character was genius uncorrupted by conscience. Inside him, polar opposites coexisted: elegance and heartlessness, fastidiousness and cruelty, insanity and insight. He's a great people-reader, exercising a hypnotic power over those he meets, and with an acute instinct for the emotional jugular. This is on display the first time Hannibal appears in the books — when Will Graham visits him in a prison cell in Red Dragon — "Graham felt that Lecter was looking through to the back of his skull. His attention felt like a fly walking around in there."

In popular culture, style trumps substance, and the mass murderer became a fashion plate, and the inspiration for dozens of upmarket killers in novels and films. Harris promoted Hannibal to leading player in the 1999 book, and has now done him the courtesy of a prequel: his life to the year 18.

In the last decade Hollywood has largely exhausted the story-telling craft and, for the most part, the star-making business. The industry had nowhere to go but backward: into the prehistory of its most popular characters. So in hope of recycling old heroes for a teen audience, it explored the early years in the legends of Superman, Batman, James Bond and Bugs Bunny, Indiana Jones and Darth Vader. So why, for love of commerce or love of his creation, shouldn't Harris examine Hannibal in his pupal or pubertal stage?

HANNIBAL PROTECTOR

Say this for Hannibal Rising: it's better than Baby Looney Toons, Young Indiana Jones or The Phantom Menace. But it certifies a radical shift in Harris' attitude toward Hannibal that was first evident in the last book and nearly consumes this one.

Here's my guess as to what happened. Harris is known to invest himself totally in the characters he creates; his agent, Mort Janklow, has spoken of the "terrible burdens" of producing these books. It's only natural that Harris would look for redeeming features in the psychopath who'd lived in his head for a quarter century. He may also have fallen under Hannibal's spell. (Novelist Martin Amis, who admires the first two Hannibal books, said Harris has lately "gone gay on" Lecter") Could it be that, like Clarice, he began Silence as Lecter's skeptical profiler and ended Hannibal as his mesmerized partner?

Whatever the reasons, Harris wants to shift the audience's take on Lecter from horrified fascination to pity, or sympathy, or empathy. Hannibal Rising is his most explicit defense: not guilty by reason of insanity, with its roots in a childhood trauma.

Watching your precious kid sister get killed and eaten might well turn you into a psychopath who kills and eats people. The argument is plausible: the bitten becomes the biter, and takes his revenge by making sure the biters get bit. Plausible, yes, but a lot less interesting than the grownup spectacle of the super-Mensa, super-crazy Hannibal in the first two books.

To explain Hannibal is to remove the reason for his tenacious, voracious hold on readers: his otherness, odious and seductive, and unexplainable by delving into his past. As the good doctor himself argued (in Silence): "Nothing happened to me. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences." Yet that's just what Harris started doing in Hannibal and what consumes the current volume. The author tries hedging his bets by writing, in Rising: "He is growing and changing, or perhaps emerging as what he has ever been." But the thrust of the book is to make Hannibal a victim stirred to righteous revenge. By allowing him to be understood, and in this conventional fashion, Harris risks diminishing him.

He's gone so far as to fiddle with aspects of his subject's biography. In Red Dragon the young Hannibal is said to have tortured animals — the first indication of a sociopathic personality. Yet in Rising he displays kindness and closeness to a flock of swans and his favorite horse, Cesar, who affectionately recalls Hannibal when he returns to the family estate 10 years after he left.

Harris has transformed Hannibal into a variation on the standard action hero: the solo commando, escaping from more confrontations with mean, tough, armed men than Schwarzenegger and Van Damme in their prime. He is also the standard movie detective, sleuthing clues as to the whereabouts of his sister's killers. Indeed, he has assumed here the role of the real heroes of Red Dragon and Silence — he's the detective and the villains are the original cannibals. Like Will Graham or Clarice Starling, he's tracking them down, slipping into their crafty minds and trying not to be killed by them.

Not that young Hannibal Lecter doesn't have his kinks. That last image of Mischa not only haunts him, it nourishes his derangement, like broth for a sick child. It encourages him to raise sadism to an art, his murders as elegant as Japanese flower arrangements, as dramatic as the flourish of a Z from Zorro's blade. Hannibal the swordsman-calligrapher slashes X's on his first victim. Later he inscribes the letter M, for Mischa, all over one of the men who had killed and consumed her.

In some respects, the 13-year-old Hannibal reminds me of the young Humbert Humbert — hero, villain and narrator of Nabokov's Lolita. Each is a well-born lad cruising through an idyllic youth that is capsized when he is separated from the girl he loves. But whereas Humbert gets locked in a time warp, incapable of loving any female older than his childhood sweetheart Annabel Leigh, Hannibal transfers his love to Lady Murasaki. This knowing, generous woman has awakened the man in a boy, and the book's real suspense is not over whether Hannibal will find the killers but whether he'll consummate his adolescent yearning for his lovely aunt, and she will complete his sentimental education.

For readers looking for early traces of familiar frissons, Harris provides Hannibal's first act of violence (attacking the butcher), his first murder (the butcher), his first interrogation by, and of, a police inspector (Inspector Popil); his first jail cell chat (except that this time he's on the other side of the bars); his first bite of a victim's flesh (both cheeks) and his first human dinner.

HANNIBAL CONNECTOR

"Hannibal Lecter, last of his line," Harris repeatedly calls him in the book. But this book is unlikely to be the last in its line. For one thing, it ends nearly 20 years before Will Graham captured Hannibal (in 1975, according to the 3,500-word biography on Wikipedia). According to the FBI dossier on Hannibal in Red Dragon, he committed nine murders — that we know of — and who knows how many drive-by nibblings.

And that's just filling in Lecter's curriculum vitae. At the end of the 1999 book, Dr. L had managed to hypnotize or brainwash Clarice, and we were left with the image of the killer and his favorite pursuer ensconced in Buenos Aires as a contented couple. Will the fair damsel snap out of it and escape her lover-tormentor? Maybe she'll unearth his submerged humanity and turn Hannibal into a vegetarian; the fava beans and Chianti would still be on the menu, but not his latest victim's liver. Or, if he's permanently lured Clarice to the dark side, they might roam the world as superstar vampire and zombie, the Brad and Angelina of psychopathic predators.

Like the young Hannibal Lecter when he first picked up one of Lady Murasaki's swords, Thomas Harris still his work cut out for him.

• Richard Corliss
• He's one of the world's greatest villians, but how did he get that way? A new book details the Chianti-drinking cannibal's early life